In which I review every book I've ever read

[Melville]

134. The Princess Bride (William Goldman, 1973)
Genre: postmodern pastiche, maybe?
Rating: 7.5

A pretty funny mock-old-timey adventure tale. More sarcastic than the movie: rather than the frame story of a lovable old grandpa reading the book to his grandson, here we get an editor (a fictional version of the real author William Goldman) who's abridging the book while telling us how dull the fake-author's original version was, how much he hates his wife, and how his kid is so fat he could roll faster than he could walk. Now that's entertainment.

Quote: "Just because you're beautiful and perfect, it's made you conceited."

[Melville]

135. Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH (Robert C. O'Brien, 1971)
Genre: the travails of hyper-intelligent anthropomorphic rodents
Rating: 7

I just looked at the plot synopsis of this, and the ending is not at all what I remembered. Here's how I remember it going down: Before the rats can implement their ambitious plan of forming a new, enlightened society of rodents, the entire rat colony is gassed by the farmers. The book ends abruptly, in a state of uncertainty. It's unclear which of the characters, if any, made it out alive. Pretty bleak for a kids' book.

[wigwam]

133. Oblomov (Goncharov, 1857)
Genre: Russian humor. also an ode to the active people
Rating: 4.5

It starts off well, with a humorously lethargic guy never getting out of bed. It keeps on well as he is enlivened by love. But it takes a turn to the obnoxious as he slides back into lethargy

oh sweet! i gave up on this when he stopped being cool bu sounds like he becomes cool again so i'll pick it back up

great thread!

[Melville]

oh sweet! i gave up on this when he stopped being cool bu sounds like he becomes cool again so i'll pick it back up

Be prepared for a lot of nothing about him, a lot of aggrandizing of the other two central characters.


136. Waiting for God (Simone Weil, 1950)
Genre: religious meditations
Rating: 4

Raised a secular Jew, Weil became a Christian mystic after experiencing a religious ecstasy in a church, falling to her knees and praying.* She thought that creation is the absence of God's perfection, that affliction brings us to him, that Christianity is radical empathy and shared suffering, that the nails in the cross pierce through creation and connect us all to the divine. Her writing reads a bit like a more devoted, fanatical version of Kierkegaard: a similar emphasis on contradictions and despair, but with none of the irony. Though that description probably underplays the severity of her spiritual masochism, which oftentimes struck me as being inspired less by religious fervor than by an intense loathing of her own physical existence—she thought she was physically disgusting and she drove herself to suffer.

Quotes: If it were conceivable that in obeying God one should bring about one's own damnation while in disobeying him one could be saved, I should still choose the way of obedience.

Every time I think of the crucifixion of Christ I commit the sin of envy.



*A philosophy professor told me a different, but uncorroborated story: that Weil converted after reading The Life of Saint Theresa in a friend's attic one night.